The pharmaceutical sciences are a group of interdisciplinary areas of study concerned with the design, action, delivery, disposition, inorganic, physical, biochemical and analytical biology (anatomy and physiology, biochemistry, cell biology, and molecular biology), epidemiology, statistics, chemometrics, mathematics, physics, and chemical engineering, and applies their principles to the study of drugs.
The pharmaceutical sciences are further subdivided into several specific specialties, with four main branches:
- Pharmacology: the study of the biochemical and physiological effects of drugs on human beings.
- Pharmacodynamics: the study of the cellular and molecular interactions of drugs with their receptors. Simply "What the drug does to the body"
- Pharmacokinetics: the study of the factors that control the concentration of drug at various sites in the body. Simply "What the body does to the drug"
- Pharmaceutical toxicology: the study of the harmful or toxic effects of drugs.
- Pharmacogenomics: the study of the inheritance of characteristic patterns of interaction between drugs and organisms.
- Pharmaceutical chemistry: the study of drug design to optimize pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and synthesis of new drug molecules.
- Pharmaceutics: the study and design of drug formulation for optimum delivery, stability, pharmacokinetics, and patient acceptance.
- Medicinal Chemistry: the study of drug design, synthesis and structural activity relationship of various drugs.
As new discoveries advance and extend the pharmaceutical sciences, subspecialties continue to be added to this list. Importantly, as knowledge advances, boundaries between these specialty areas of pharmaceutical sciences are beginning to blur. Many fundamental concepts are common to all pharmaceutical sciences. These shared fundamental concepts further the understanding of their applicability to all aspects of pharmaceutical research and drug therapy.
This is an essential part of the medical scines.
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“Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. The power of invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and the labour of learning those sciences which may, by mere labour, be obtained, is too great to be willingly endured; but every man can exert some judgment as he has upon the works of others; and he whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of critic.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)